Got your tickets for the men's final at Wimbledon yet? If not, no need to worry. You can still get your hands on some – if you are willing to shell out at least £2,200 apiece.

The tickets are among dozens listed on Viagogo, an online marketplace for people to resell tickets to sporting or music events, described by the firm as a consumer champion, while disparaged by critics as electronic touting that puts tickets out of reach for real fans. Prices go as high as £10,361, with the promise of an "unbelievably good view".

The All England Club allows debenture holders to resell, but looks darkly on the unofficial secondary market for other tickets. Chief executive Ian Ritchie said Wimbledon works "vigorously" to protect the right of fans to buy at face value. The England and Wales Cricket Board, which tried to clamp down on the secondary market for the recent World Twenty20 event, including the cancellation of 1,000 tickets that had been resold, speaks more plainly. Tim Payton, an adviser to the ECB, describes Eric Baker, the Los Angeles native who founded the site, as a "ticket pimp".

"He undermines our pricing model, which we arrive at for the long-term benefits of the sport," Payton says. "We fix prices well below the market rate and don't need him to tell us that. We do it to let families in, to reward sports clubs and to keep the game healthy. He defines the fan as the person with the biggest wallet. We've nothing against tickets being resold for face value, or even a small commission, but are you doing a service to anyone by selling a ticket at 10 times its price? That only benefits the man in the middle."

Baker is not the type of internet entrepreneur who started as a child tinkering in his bedroom or parents' garage and came up with a brilliant piece of technology. He a Stanford MBA graduate and former management consultant who has trained with the sole purpose of becoming his or her own boss and making a mint.

Eureka

The Viagogo boss worked at McKinsey and private equity firm Bain Capital before coming up with the idea at the tail end of the internet boom in late 2000 for StubHub, to resell tickets in the US after buying tickets for The Lion King in New York on a street corner. StubHub sold to eBay for more than $300m (£180m), $30m of that making its way into Baker's bank account.

Baker had quit StubHub shortly before it was sold after falling out with his co-founder. Uncertain what to do next, he had a eureka moment: "I was talking about travelling on the phone with a friend of mine and then I was like 'Gee, that's interesting, why don't they have a secondary ticketing company in Europe?' It was like, I mean, this almost felt like, I gotta do this now because how is someone not going to figure this out? Particularly because I knew how successful StubHub was becoming. Western Europe was a huge opportunity. It just made so much sense."

Baker moved to London at the start of 2006, opened an office, initially with seed capital from American backers, and signed a series of deals. The business is an official re-sale partner with Manchester United and Chelsea, French Open tennis, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lord Lloyd-Webber's Really Useful Group. The list of investors includes former tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, French luxury goods tycoon Bernard Arnault, Lastminute co-founder Brent Hoberman and Lord Rothschild. While according to the most recent accounts, the company had lost more than £11m by the end of 2007, Baker claims to have raised $70m.

With the exception of football (unless agreed with individual clubs) reselling tickets is not illegal. But the burgeoning industry faces another government inquiry, which has proposed the possible ring-fencing of crown jewel events such as Wimbledon.

Baker has well rehearsed arguments. "If the question is, are consumers, are fans, better off because Viagogo exists, we passionately believe yes. If there is no Viagogo, what happens? You have to meet someone down the pub, wear a red hat, bring a bag of cash. You might get a fraudulent ticket, you might be mugged. With Viagogo, the buyer will get the ticket they paid for on time, it will be authentic and the seller will also get paid. People have been looking for a solution to this since the days of the gladiators. We are helping to get rid of the street touts and the people selling fraudulently, and that is a good thing."

He says that by aggregating sellers on a website it also provides transparency in the market and actually brings prices down. The business registers both buyer and seller and tracks the journey of the ticket to make sure it arrives on time.

Baker blames Wimbledon for creating its own black market: "If you take the Wimbledon men's final, almost no tickets are available to the general public. What we are doing is, if they can't use their tickets, at least now you can buy one from them in a safe secure way. We think they should be more reasonable about how they distribute tickets in the first place." According to the All England Club, less than 10% of tickets are held for hospitality on Centre Court, 15% for debentures and 55% made available to the public by annual ballot.

Extreme

But critics argue that even when the tickets are made available by the likes of Viagogo, only wealthy fans benefit. Culture secretary Andy Burnham said last year that reselling tickets at inflated prices adds nothing to the cultural life of the country but rather "leeches off it and denies access to those least able to afford tickets".

Baker responds: "When people want to stir things up, they say 'Did you see there was a ticket for the men's Wimbledon final for £2,000' and point to extreme events. But for a ton of events, the average ticket we sell is typically only about 15% to 20% above the face value, and a lot of tickets trade for less… we are providing a way for people to have transparency and eliminate the fraud."

Sites such as Viagogo have been acc­used of encouraging the growth of bedroom touts, who snap up tickets with the sole purpose of making a profit, but Baker insists there are just a few bad apples. If organised crime is involved in touting, he has not come across it: "I can't imagine Tony Soprano's grand scheme is dealing tickets."

He says the business sold about $100m of tickets last year, with the company making 25%. In the second year of the business, Viagogo generated more revenue than the entire first three years of StubHub. The name Viagogo was an invention designed to work across Europe.

"Rather than 'getaticket' or something, we figured something more like a Google. And we haven't offended anyone in Europe yet." He pauses. "At least not because of the name."

Baker, whose grandparents both started their own businesses, waxes lyrical about his long-held ambition to be an entrepreneur. You did though, I suggest, only come up with the one idea. "Yeah, but it was a good one . It will be on my tombstone, 'he was all about tickets'."